What's up with my hair

My hair is a mess of greatness. It's a beautiful bit of God's handiwork. And what fills my brain has a direct effect on the appearance of my hair. That is of course scientifically totally wrong, but I really would like it to be fact.

My grandmother, Else Christensen, told my mother while I was in the womb that she wanted a blond curly-headed boy. I heard her. The being that eventually would be known as MDA emerged from said womb, bummer, as a flat-haired blob with red streaks on his face, so the anticipation was prolonged. But of course in a few years I had indeed become a frilly-red-haired kid with spacious teeth and the whitest skin a mother would ever dare to expose to the sun. I heard stories of my grandmother's giddy pride at being quite the prognosticator, but she was also just giddy because I was, really, so damn curly with all that curliness. Slowly my head grew out those short curls into long curlicues and my country-grandma loved to see my head get disheveled and strewn with dirt when we visited her up north to pick blackberries, apples, pears and figs on our family's farm. It was the late 70s, you could let your hair go long, and grandma was a very cool lady much younger in mind than her body actually was. And she had curly hair.

But when I became a choirboy, my hair was lopped off at the horizon of a starched neckline on a white collared shirt. Any sign of curling in the coif was quickly lanced at the hands of Rick the Barber, who manned the hair of all who perused Noriega Street in the Sunset district of San Francisco and who was seriously rooted in the '50s well into the '90s. This hair was documented in its manicured state in yearbook after yearbook, in choir photos taken one after another all around the world for years... the clean-cut boy with the really-way-too-oval glasses in front of ____________ with a tie on or those long red white and blue tube socks that now would go for legwarmers in yoga classes. It's a time period involving massive couture changes and garment bags and awkwardness. But the hair stood still, and the air was ripe with the delicious apple scents of Salon Selectives.

Then came the Great Graduation from the choir and the emergence of the college life years, a long extension of high school when I dabbled in slovenliness within the constraining default settings of my choirboy haircut, my head trapped in one world and yet the hair knowingly free to ramble. The result was... poofy. Poofy hair, like a halo circling my bearded face, each hair awakening from it's trimmed hibernation and venturing toward the light, grouping together for safety and companionship, wanting independence but afraid to wander and become lost. Or perhaps trimmed again. A poof. It didn't know what to do, and it probably had to do with the fact that I didn't know what to with it, or with anything else at that point.

It wasn't until the turn of the century when I finally Let My Hair Git Down With Its Badself for a year and a half. Changing climates, attitudes and wardrobes, I worked among mad-new amounts of people turned family as my head followed my body into the snow-covered Cascade Mountains of Washington to be an intentional wanderer in an intentional community. Sun-bleached hair follicles found new life, the brain exploring and thereby extolling the dermal tendrils to leap from my head and sprout, then bounce, frolic, spring and twirl for inches and inches, and more inches. Women would braid it. Children would use it as reins when I was employed as their horse. It danced underwater and clung tight to my back when I broke the surface. And whatever it did wherever I was, for the first time since I even knew I had hair, I didn't even notice or care about it. And the hair was cool with that. And I was cool with the hair. It was burned often in campfires because of this yet nary a peep was heard save a sizzle. It even developed an untangle-able tangle, which I guess could only be one thing, a dreadlock. And that name, dreadlock, me not being a rasta and all, it just wasn't me.

So, a good year later, after moving once again to another culture that prided itself on Salon Selectivized doo's stuck somewhere between West Side Story and Devo and in which I simply tried just to not look like someone who might deserve to get arrested, I shaved the whole damn thing, damn near. One fateful St. Patrick's Day in Munich I let my friend, who was one fewer weisbier into the day than I was (and it was his weisbier too), grab a pair of electric barber sheers just like Rick the Barber used and put them to my scalp on the very generous 5mm setting. What followed were some of the coldest mornings my brain can remember. And I liked it. I did it again in the summer. And never, ever did I walk out the door fully dressed without an absolute perfect picture in my head of how I looked above the shoulders. I had the carefree freedom without the cultural stigma of slovenliness, and I didn't have to use any product. Life was good.

But no, it wasn't, really. The follicles called, reminding me of just how damn boring it was to hold back the possibilities for the sake of convenience. And they were right, the hair follicles were when they said that to me. So the hair, it grew back, mightily, and was cut, and grew back and was cut badly and then grew out hopefully and quickly cut better. And so on. Today, my hair is longer than it has been in a long time, but now, a kind of clearing has been made around the crown of my head and all that long hair falls like wheat away from the cleared circle. The resulting look is what may be mistaken someday for a monk's cut, at which point I will so-hopefully-not be a monk and therefore just do the Bruce Willis thing and once and for all hibernate the story of my hair. You may think I am vain, and you are probably right, no you are definitely right. But I hope I am just thankful, and aware, and present, and thinking that perhaps, for a guy who has very few places where his hair is actually in recession, I might offer a living memorial. The hair can't speak. But it's had a good life, I'll tell you.